A Study on Rural Marketing in India Challenges and Opportunities

Rural marketing is a process of developing, pricing, promoting, and distributing rural specific goods and services leading to desired exchange with rural customers to satisfy their needs and wants, and also to achieve organizational objectives In India, except few metropolitan cities, almost all the districts and industrial townships are well connected with rural markets The rural population in India accounts for around 627 million, which is exactly 74.3 percent of the total population. The rural market in India is vast and scattered and offers a plethora of opportunities in comparison to the urban sector. In the recent years, rural markets in India have undergone considerable changes as the urban markets have hit saturation and relative growth has slowed down. Marketers have realized that rural India has tremendous potential and with increasing focus of the policy makers on injecting money to pump the rural economy have all contributed towards an increased interest of businesses towards rural India. Due to green revolution, the rural areas are consuming a large quantity of industrial and manufactured products. In this way rural market offers opportunities in the form of large untapped market, increase in disposable income, increase in literacy level and large scope for penetration. To take the advantage of these opportunities, a special marketing strategy 'Rural Marketing' has emerged. This paper tries to understand the rural market, importance of rural marketing and status of rural market. The main aim of the study to observe the potentiality of Indian rural markets and find out various problems are being faced by rural marketer. Dr. Geeta Yadav "A Study on Rural Marketing in India: Challenges and Opportunities" Published in International Journal of Trend in Scientific Research and Development (ijtsrd), ISSN: 2456-6470, Volume-2 | Issue-2 , February 2018, URL: https://www.ijtsrd.com/papers/ijtsrd9498.pd